As electronic devices continue to reach higher levels of performance through among others shrinking feature sizes, greater integration and higher clock frequencies, manufacturers of automatic test equipment (ATE) have struggled to improve ATE performance. ATE test systems typically include one or more subsystems to enable testing of one or more devices under test (DUTs) in parallel. Each subsystem corresponds to a system resource that communicates with one or more consumers of such system resource (e.g., a DUT or part of a DUT) during testing of DUTs. A consumer of a system resource is commonly referred to as a “sink.” An example of a system resource is a pattern generator that generates and broadcasts a test signal to one or more DUTs.
To improve ATE throughput and reduce the cost of test, there is a current trend towards increasing the number of test resources. However, each test resource has a certain, known failure rate. As a result, increasing the number of resources also increases the overall ATE failure rate and reduces the ATE mean time between failures (MTBF). At one point, any improvement in ATE throughput and cost resulting from increasing the number of test resources further will be offset by the decrease in ATE throughput resulting from the reduced MTBF as well as the additional cost associated with a failure.
In addition, increasing the number of test resources also increases the cost of an ATE test system. As a result, increasing the number of test resources may increase the cost of the ATE test system without providing the desired increase in test throughput. Thus, what is needed is a system architecture that, given a number of resources, maximizes throughput while minimizing the MTBF.